number 34 • Winter 2018

Authors

Jason W. A. Bertsch

articles

ALTHOUGH they have become a favorite punching bag for many conservative commentators, intellectuals play an important role in American life. Their impact is felt not only on university campuses and in the pages of academic journals but also inside the White House. In fact, intellectuals are so important to the American presidency that U.S. presidents “ignore the intellectuals at their peril.” This is the thesis of Tevi Troy’s important and absorbing book Intellectuals and the American Presidency: Philosophers, Jesters, or Technicians?

WRITERS often overestimate themselves and their projects, which they consider more important, urgent, and original than they really are. Marc and Marque-Luisa Miringoff, the authors of The Social Health of the Nation: How America is Really Doing, † are a case in point. The book is the culmination of more than a decade of research, and backed by the weight of the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and the work of over two dozen scholars. Thus the Miringoffs begin their book on a grand note: “Although much social data exists on many important aspects of daily life, it is usually not made available in a form that is accessible to the public, to the makers of policy, or to the media.” But this is simply not true.

DIFFERENCES between the early and late American presidency are easy enough to recognize. The twentieth-century executive branch is larger than its nineteenth-century counterpart, more apt to introduce and supervise legislative programs like the Great Society, and less shy about invoking veto powers. Similarly, twentieth-century presidents more often rely upon “unilateral” powers such as the withholding of documents from Congress under the auspices of “executive privilege” or the initiation of executive agreements instead of Senate-approved treaties. These developments, which are the preoccupation of a great many presidential scholars, are undeniable. But what we often forget is a much simpler, much more important, fact: The single greatest difference between early and contemporary American presidencies is the expansion of the role of rhetoric.